ACDH Lecture 5.1

Things that Poems Taught Me about Visualization

Miriah Meyer University of Utah

Things that Poems Taught Me about Visualization

For a computer scientist, collaborating with humanists can be a challenging, interesting, and productive experience. It can also seed ideas and insights with long-term implications for visualization research. In this talk, visualization designer Miriah Meyer will reflect on a collaboration with poetry scholars that impacted her own research thinking in deep and disruptive ways. She will describe learning that came out of this digital humanities project through the lens of several recent studies, each with core ideas that trace back to work with poetry scholars.

Miriah Meyer (USA) is a computer scientist and a pioneer in the field of data visualization. Her work is dedicated to the design of visualization systems that allow analysts to make sense of complex data, and to the development of new design methods for visualization designers. With a background in astronomy and astrophysics (Penn State University), Miriah earned her PhD in computer science from the University of Utah. She is now associate professor in the School of Computing and a faculty member of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, and co-directs the Visualization Design Lab at the same university. Miriah has been the recipient of numerous fellowships (Harvard University, TED, etc.) and grants, and has worked as a science writer for the Chicago Tribune in the past. Currently, she is spending a sabbatical term in Vienna.